Unhurriedly

Slowly, a wisp of steam curls up, viewed from the rear view mirror through an age-etched window. The light is still red and has been for quite a while. Much newer cars are piled up far beyond sight, past the curve on the on ramp tunnel. The old man, whose wrinkled bald pate matches the worn leather interior, has silenced the car large engine and dozily stares out the window at the imperceptible strobe of the LED stop light. It’s light is reflected in dozens of staring eyes, dozens of darkened headlamps.

All of the cars behind him have also gone quiet; their programming is such that any extended wait causes them to sleep. In the mirror, the drivers shift uncomfortably behind the steering consoles. Cramped legs get a brief respite in their new positions. Expensive shoes get scuffed on the underside of the dash as they hunt for a more ergonomic angle. Their passengers have run out of reading materials, having even gone so far as to rummage through the glove box in their desperation. They fall back into their own daydreams of productive work, productive consumerism and productive breeding. Children sleep in the back seats, having tired of their games. Comfortable, but restless, lacking constant input and running low on mood stabilizing chemicals in their blood.

Having long since run out of cigarettes (available only from Canadian prescription drug companies), the old man has picked a hole in the cracked flesh of the antiquated steering wheel in front of him. The exposed rotting foam disintegrates into a fine carcinogenic dust that hangs in the air. It floats out the open window, past the arm leaning out, long sleeves rolled up.

The air hardly moves, this far up the ramp. It’s long empty path leads down onto the blur of the hi-way, where the wind is ripped from the tunnel and dragged along. It is hard at times to tell where one car ends and the next begins, persistence of vision merges them into a constant stream of metal, plastic, glass and light.

Hardly recognizing the aged face staring back at him in the mirror, the old man fishes into his front shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes he knows is empty. He wonders how it has been so long, here at the stoplight and here in general, inside this worn body. A wink of light brings his eyes back forward. A tiny LED in the array of the stoplight has gone out, an unlikely event, but only a sustained wait this long could have brought it about. Brain cells, he thinks, must be like that. One minute they’re on, a puff of a cigarette or a sip of beer later and one goes out. Here and there its no big thing, but after all this time. His idly searching hands have found a crumpled but still intact cigarette wedged in the back of the seat.

With a quick calculation on his remaining brain cells he lights the stale cigarette with his battered lighter. All cigarettes are stale now, so it doesn’t matter. Huge warehouses of stock that only a few old men who don’t want to live forever slowly deplete the last of the inventory left over from factories that have since been demolished to make way for condos stacked tightly in hip reconditioned neighborhoods.

Silent smoke alarms alert one of the many AI to a possible problem in the hi-way system. Today it has been assigned to this section of road. Modern AI have to be rotated on job schedules, because unlike us, they won’t put up with the possibility of another shitty day at the office. Like our dosed children, they need constant change. Otherwise they stop working, they shut down. Annoyed by the fact that there seems to be a vehicle waiting at the light in order to merge onto the hi-way but there is no performance data for either the car or the driver, the AI has chosen to rise to the challenge. It has, despite its need for change, decided to ignore the problem and to wait the problem out.

The normal functions of the hi-way are usually controlled by lower computer functions. Information about the car and driver are tracked via extended RFID. When a car comes to the on ramp, the system finds an appropriate hole in the traffic flow based on the car’s capabilities and the drivers tendencies and will hold it at the on ramp’s light until the optimal time.

When an error occurs functionality is passed to the higher functions and the AI. Normally it is a routine matter for the AI to make a judgment call based on a wider range of inputs and tracking data. However, there is always input. There is always data.

The car and the man waiting at the light, trying to merge onto the busy road is a ghost as far as the AI is concerned. And it’s superstitiality, which was originally programmed in as a preservation device has made it regard this situation as something it wants nothing to do with and has decided to pretend not to notice it, optimizing traffic flow elsewhere in the system.

It can’t ignore, the growing line of cars that are getting mired behind the ghost. It can’t hide form the fire, chemical, and physical hazard alarms that have been steadily flashing in its minds eye. It can’t keep dodging questions from the interconnected systems, from its governing daemons and it human supervisors. They grow louder and more persistent, but the AI does its best to stay busy but away from the problem.

Even now, at the light, it is silent. It is red.

what would you have done? do a little math. then get the shit beat out of you. stupid meat heads.

what do you do when six meatheads cross the street in front of you?

well, i wouldn’t know about you, but he sped up.

anger, shouts and incredulousness passed between them and the inches that kept them from the danger of one ton of pain. hey man, i’m just along for the ride. their heads are made of meat so they don’t understand the position i’m in. i smiled, not at their inconvenience nor their near death at the hands of my belligerent friend behind the wheel, but at my own nervousness.

i’ve looked into their eyes. i saw the adrenaline. the beer. the excuse. we turn right at the corner and the situation is abated. again we turn right at the corner. and i see them. we’ve been out flanked, its a classic move. i think these meat heads might have a college education.

eye contact again, pink meat dripping blood, dilated cornea blood vessels. my window was open and it was too late. a dull thud and a tingle as his body hit the car and his fist hit my neck and shoulder. it was a sloppy punch, but what do you expect from a guy throwing a punch at a car.

luckily the spit missed.

we go straight through the light and the tingle turns to warmth. i felt disappointed, in a way, that it won’t leave a bruise. we turn left at the corner. i know what might happen. driver boy is laughing, but they weren’t on his side. left at the light.

halfway down the block i make eye contact. i smile. he doesn’t like my apology. his arm went through the open back window missing the one ducked back there. a shout. a missed punch. and a fine mist of spittle, i wonder where he’s been.

by now this light is red. i look in the side mirror back down the street from whence we came. silhouettes come towards us. quietly i say turn on red. we don’t move. turn on red. what now? yes. we crept forward a few inches. right now? yes. by now he’s running. yes, on red, right now. we go, but not before we wait for him to get close enough so that he thinks he needs to keep on running after us.

the game is over by now. our intrepid captain has had enough fun at their, and our, expense. he laughs, we grimace. some bravado is shown but in the end we are the ones who had the armour.

later on i tell of my own botched attemts on grabbing the arm of the one who actually hit me. of wanting to hold on to his arm as we drag him down the street. of rolling the window up. and i realize i’m no better than the rest of them.

i make eye contact in the vanity mirror. i see my own pupil. dialated. dripping fresh, red meat blood out of a gaping severed vessel.

a new one. tv does strange things to your mind. studies show that your brain’s alpha waves drop to below sleep levels. so how is it possible that it could raise sexual desires? read on my pavlovian friends.

it started as a means to cover up what was going on. her roommate would be home and we would need something more than a closed door to make our privacy complete. most people would have turned on the stereo to some mood music, but i guess we’re not most people. that and we don’t have a stereo in the bedroom. go figure. so, i turned on the television.

as i’m flipping through the chanels to find the perfect broadcast to fuck to i was daunted by the complexities of the problem. she just wanted to get off, but i need the satisfaction of being apropriate. no kids shows and no news, that would have just made it rubbery. no hot chicks, i didn’t want to be caught peeking over her shoulder when one of them is on the screen. thats as good as cheating. in general, i wanted no real distraction that would put a damper on my love making.

i was looking for the tv equivelant of muzak.

finding the right station happend quicker that i had expected, lucky for her. the rabbit ears severly inhibit our media rich age. click. click. click. and here we have this lovely pendant. you can see by the size of this stone we are giving you an amazing deal. oh, and the craftsmanship is exquisite. with our ezpay you can have this sent to your door for only three payments of $25.95.

the home shopping network. a channel for dead people. and apperintly the perfect fuck show. nothing of interest, no pretty girls, no fast cuts, and no pertinent information. yet still loud enough with the door closed to keep the roomate from complaining about how often we have sex.

this lovely pant suit set was designed exclusivly for us by some nobody who is pretending to be from europe but is actually living with his mom in west virginia. for the next five minutes the sales personality made up bullshit about the same ugly buisiness atire while we went at it. then a fake silk sundress. then a rhinestone broach. a purse. a toolset. a rotary grinder.

after we had finished, i lay there and the person on the tv told me how perfect a food processor would go with the moment. fellas, she will love you forever if you were to buy her this amazing piece of equipment for her kitchen. it would go great with olive pitter, item number 425-668 we had earlier in the hour. i’ll tell you what, i have one of these at home and i use it every day! every single day. i can make my own peanut butter and gazpacho and meat pudding. eazy a pie. hell, you can make pie too!

she almost had me convinced to buy the damn thing when i drifted off to sleep and had sex tainted tv shopping dreams. home shopping pornography is something i don’t want to think about too often. especially when it involves kitchen equipment.

we use that trick and even that station when we need that little extra privacy. to this day i still get horny when i flip past the home shopping network.

pavlov would have loved me.

4:31 am tuesday morning…

i’m awake and no one cares. so, i’ll get up. i’ll take my shower, brush my teeth and scratch my ass. three little blue and white gelcaps, two more than i should have, and a sip of yesterdays coffee. i think about brushing my teeth again, but i worry about my gums bleeding. up for fifteen minutes and i already have morbid thoughts about my teeth.

teeth. it’s not like i’ve ever had perfect teeth in my life, but i dream about them each night. each night they get looser and looser. they move more and more in my head as i tongue them. each one turns a different color as i have a putrid rainbow of a smile. diseaseing my gums and the rest of my mouth while my tounge looses the abuility to taste all but my own blood and rotting bacteria making cheese out of my enamel.

having just fallen into an alley out of the second story window of a random building in a random dirty city, i was not too much in the mood for divine revalation. then again i was thanking god —or any god for that matter— that there was a nice heaping pile of trash for me to land on. “fuck me,” i said while picking bananna peels out of my hair. their shouting had started to fade as i slowly edged my way out of purtid garabage bags and broken bottles. unfortunatly, as their shouting got quieter, thier footsteps were getting louder. so, it was back into the crap for me.

“he had to have come out back here.”

“but did he go up or down?”

“i doubt he’d go up, not like he could get off the roof with us down here,” and he stepped around the corner, his bulk casting even more darkness into the already black alley. while i was burying myself deeper into the trash pile, i could tell… i could tell… oh shit, what could i tell? all i knew is that i really didn’t want them to find me. i mean hell, they were worse than the mormans. that little voice in my head told me that these guys were up to no good. the first one, the large one with the fat face and the uni-brow struck me as the purse snatching sort. while the other one was the most absurdly calm and normal person i had ever met.

“shh… i think i hear him,” said normal guy as he sowly worked his way through the shadows of the alley with his flashlight. “if he came out of the windows up there, he would have fallen straight down. he’s probably out cold.”

lucky for me i wasn’t but i knew i was stuck back here until they left. as deep as i could go without making any more noise all that was uncovered was half of my right eye. i hoped that the flashlight wouldn’t shine too brightly off of it.

they told me i was one of the lucky ones. as i see it, i don’t think that i was. of everyone frozen back in those days only 15% were recovered to a fully functional state, which was a pretty loose term. as for the rest, again the lucky ones died during the freeze. the rest were braindead from decades of cold dreams.

so, they tell me i’m the lucky one. all that i have from them is enough credit to get a transport and an id card. the cerdits slide into the trasport and i begin to weave in and out of traffic, the computer controled flow coreoghraphed by a distant computer always keeping above it’s i centimeter proximity tolernace level. i pass through an intersection without even slowing as a car coming from the right and i cringe. my yesterday didn’t alow for such things. the id has already been tossed in the disposal, i know that it meant to comfort the old ones from a bygone era as i finger the insicion healing on the back of my arm.

i’m lucifer…

now before you condemn me, know that i am the good guy. all this time, i’ve been accused of dragging the rest of you down. bullshit! i’ve been trying to to raise you above the rest. i know what’s going on and i’m not willing to ignore it. those funking angles point their fingers at me. they say its all my fault. trite bastards. they bask in thier own glory while he plots the end. they would be pleased as shit should it all end.

oh, i’m sorry, this all just gets me so depressed. afterall, i care.

selected tidbits ripped from an archived database of my now stolen (god speed wherever you are!) palm handheld. while these are only a fraction of what was there, these are the fav of the bunch. so, fuck off!

<palm name="algore">
i am al gore, kill a fetus, save a tree!
i am al gore, i subjigate the bastions of democracy!

-a very drunk hick yinzer hippy outside harris after being kicked out.
 </palm>